90 tion: it was deplored because of its excess Dido Merwin couldn't stand Plath, and had waited thirty years to tell the world what she thought of her former "friend," depicting her as the unbearable wife of a long-suffering martyr. Accord- ing to Merwin, the wonder was not that Hughes left Plath but that he "stuck it out as long as he dId." After the separa- tion, Merwin writes, she asked Hughes "what had been hardest to take during the time he and Sylvia were together," and he revealed that Plath, in a fit of jealous rage, had torn into small pieces all his work-in-progress of the winter of 1961, as well as his copy of Shakespeare. Merwin also recalls as if it had happened yesterday a disastrous visit that Plath and Hughes paid her and her then husband, the poet W. S. Merwin, at their farm- house, in the Dordogne. Plath "used up all the hot water, repeatedly helped her- self from the fridge (breakfasting on what one had planned to serve for lunch, etc.), and rearranged the furniture in their bedroom." She cast such a pall with her sulking (though her appetite never diminished, Merwin notes, and tells of balefully watching Plath attack a fine foie gras "for all the world as though it were 'Aunt Dot's meat loaf''') that Hughes had to cut the visit short. Anne Stevenson was heavily criticized for giv- ing an "unbalanced" idea of Plath by in- cluding this venomous portrait in her biography. In fact, where Anne Stevenson made her mistake of balance was not in in- cluding such a negative view of Plath but in including such a subversively lively piece of writing. The limitations of bio- graphical writing are never more evident than when one turns from it to writing in another genre; and when, led by a footnote, I turned from the text of "Bit- ter Fame" to Dido Merwin's memoir I felt as if I had been freed from prison. The hushed cautiousness, the solemn weighing of "evidence," the humble "she must have felt"s and "he probably thought"s of biographical writing had given way to a high-spirited subjectivity. Writing in her own voice as her own person, fettered by no rules of epistemo- logical deportment, Dido could let rip. She knew exactly how she felt and what she thought. The contrast between the omniscient narrator of "Bitter Fame," whose mantle of pallid judiciousness Anne Stevenson was obliged to wear, and the robustly intemperate "I" of the Merwin memoir is striking. Merwin's portrait of Plath is a self-portrait of Merwin, of course. It is she, rather than Plath, who emerges, larger than life, from "Vessel of Wrath," and whose obliterating vividness led readers into their error of questioning Anne Steven- , . son s motIves. T HE first of the bad reviews of "Bitter Fame"-a powerful harbinger- appeared in the September 28, 1989, is- sue of The New York Revlew of Books and was by the English writer A. Alvarez. Alvarez was a logical choice to review "Bitter Fame." As poetry editor of the Observer in the nineteen-sixties, he was one of the first people in England to rec- ognize Plath's talent; he had published several of her poems in the Observer. In 1971, he had himself written a memoir of Plath; it appeared as the first chapter of "The Savage God," a book he wrote about suicide, and it was the first ac- count in print to give details of Plath's death. Like Dido Merwin's memoir- like every memoir-Alvarez's is a work of autobiography, though what Merwin does naïvely and unwittingly he does art- fully and consciously. He works his rec- ollections of Plath into a kind of alle- gory of suicidal drive; the depression and disorder of his own life (he tells us he swallowed forty-five sleeping pills a de- cade earlier) are fused with and meta- phorized by the last act of her life, when she gambled with fate-as Alvarez char- acterizes it, and as he himself did-and lost. Alvarez argues, giving chilling de- tails, that Plath meant to be found and saved, and that she died only because of a :&eakish series of accidents. His argu- ment is compelling and horrifYing. But it is a second narrative, a sort of sub-allegory, that gives Alvarez's mem- oir its high verve and also its status as a foundation text of the Plath legend. This is the narrative of the flow of power be- tween husband and wife-the story of how, during the two years of his ac- quaintance with Plath and Hughes, Alvarez watched power go from one to the other, like water poured from one pitcher into another. At first, the hus- band was the full vessel. "This was Ted's time," Alvarez writes about Hughes when he first met him, in London, in the spring of 1960; Hughes's second book of poems, "Lupercal," had just ap- peared and Alvarez thought it "the best book by a young poet that I had read since I began my stint on the Observer." Alvarez goes on to describe the poet himselE "He was a tall, strong-looking man in a black corduroy jacket, black trousers, black shoes; hIS dark hair hung untidily forward; he had a long, witty mouth. He was in command." In con- trast, he says, Plath was just a banal little housewife, "briskly American: bright, clean, competent, like a young woman in a cookery advertisement." Alvarez didn't notice her very much then. He re- ports an embarrassing moment when, as he and Hughes were going out the door (the two of them would take walks or go to the pub, while Plath stayed home), Plath shyly stopped him and mentioned a poem of hers that he had accepted for publication in the Observer the previous year. At first, Alvarez didn't know what she was talking about-he simply didn't connect the bright, clean housewife with the world of poetry, and hadn't known that her writing name was Plath. Later that year, when Plath's first book of poems, "The Colossus," was published in England, Alvarez reviewed it for the Observer. "It seemed to fit the image I had of her: serious, gifted, with- held, and still partly under the massive shadow of her husband," he writes in his memoir. He praised Plath's poems for their technical proficiency but felt that something was being held back: "Be- neath most of the poems was a sense of resources and disturbances not yet d " tappe . Alvarez went to America to teach for a term, and when he returned to Lon- don, in February of 1961, his relation- ship with the couple attenuated: "Ted had fallen out of love with London and was fretting to get away; Sylvia had been ill-first a miscarriage, then appendici- tis-and I had my own problems, a di- vorce." When he saw them next, in June, 1962, they were living in Devon, in Court Green, an old manor house with a thatched roof and a cobbled courtyard and a big wild garden and orchard, next to a twelfth-century church. It was now Sylvià s time, Alvarez reports: They had had a new baby in January, a boy [Nicholas], and Sylvia had changed. No longer quiet and withheld, a housewifely appendage to a powerful husband, she seemed made solid and complete, her own woman again. Perhaps the birth of a son